Short answers, pulled from the story.
John Westerdale Bowker, born on the 30th of July 1935, is an English Anglican priest and scholar credited with introducing religious studies as an academic discipline to Cambridge University. He has held professorships at Cambridge, Lancaster, the University of Pennsylvania, and North Carolina State University, and is an Honorary Canon of Canterbury Cathedral.
Bowker challenged Dawkins's claim that belief in God is a kind of mental virus, delivering detailed lectures at Gresham College in 1992 and 1993. He argued that this account of religious motivation is "far removed from evidence and data" and that the God-meme framework lacks the objectivity required to label specific behaviours as diseased.
Published in 2005, The Sacred Neuron: The Extraordinary New Discoveries Linking Science and Religion argues that faith and belief are not separate from reason but rooted in it. Bowker draws on neuroscience, particularly neurophysiology, to show how the brain processes ideas into beliefs, proposing that treating rationality and faith as complementary can help resolve conflicts between religions and cultures.
Bowker was Dean of Chapel at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge from 1962, became an Assistant Lecturer in 1965 and a full Lecturer in 1970. He returned to Cambridge in 1984 as Dean of Chapel at Trinity College, a role he held until 1991, and remained a Fellow of Trinity College until 1993.
Bowker performed his national service with the Royal West African Frontier Force in northern Nigeria before beginning his academic career. He subsequently became the Henry Stevenson Fellow at the University of Sheffield in 1961.
John Bowker held the Gresham Professorship of Divinity at Gresham College, London from 1992 to 1997. It was during these Gresham lectures that he collaborated with Quinton Deeley to analyse and critique Richard Dawkins's God-meme hypothesis.